Google & FeedBurner

I haven’t had a chance to think long and hard yet about Google’s recent decision to acquire FeedBurner, and I’m sure most reactions will center on how this provides Google yet another medium to deliver contextual ads.

But my first reaction was slightly different:

What FeedBurner seems to provide Google — as much as an advertising medium — is an automatic feed of new Web content and an instant mapping of the all important links between pages. Now, instead of Google needing to rely on the efficiency of its crawlers to find these new blog posts, they will be delivered right to Google’s front door every time we ping http://ping.feedburner.com.